Profile summary

Professional biography

John Allen’s teaching and research experience includes work on issues of power and spatiality, more recently in relation to financialization, borders and topology.

He has taught at The Open University for nearly forty years and has a long-standing commitment to both introductory and interdisciplinary courses in the Social Sciences. He is a member of the Academy of Social Sciences and has held Visiting Professorships in both Australia and Switzerland.

Research interests

My research interests fall into two related areas, both of which have tended to blend into one another over time. I have a long-standing interest in the relationship between geography and power, more specifically the difference that spatiality makes to the way that power works in its various modalities, from domination and authority through to seduction and manipulation.

In 2003, I published a book-length treatment on the subject, Lost Geographies of Power (Oxford, Blackwell) and have followed this up in 2016 with Topologies of Power: Beyond Territory and Networks (Oxford and New York, Routledge), which explores a range of topological insights into power’s spatial twists and turns in these more complex, globalised times. I have also recently become interested in what a nonhuman dimension to power might look like when the ‘power’ to make life live is the central focus of enquiry. This interest was explored through an ESRC funded research project on the farm and food processing industries in the UK, in collaboration with colleagues at Exeter University, and the results was published in 2017 by Wiley Blackwell under the title, Pathological Lives: Disease, Space and Biopolitics (with Steve Hinchliffe, Nick Bingham & Simon Carter).

In parallel to this broad topic of spatiality and power, I have for some time been interested in the work of George Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer. The two theorists have informed much of my thinking on public spaces and seduction in an urban context, as well as giving me an insight into phenomenological accounts of the urban. This work has appeared in journals such as New Formations and Urban Studies.

A repository of research publications and other research outputs can be viewed at The Open University's Open Research Online.

Teaching interests

I am currently a member of DD213 Environment & Society Module Team, which has its first presentation in 2018, writing on animal commodification and the difference that markets make to how envirionments are grasped. Prior to that, I wrote on power and supermarkets for DD102, a Level 1 foundation course, which was published as part of Understanding Social Lives in 2014, as well as on sweatshops and political responsibility for Living in a Globalised World (DD205 ), which was published as part of a collection by Sage in 2008, as Geographies of Globalisation.

I believe strongly in the dynamic between teaching and research, and have practiced that in over fourteen Open University courses, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.